It’s not uncommon to fumble in a state of low energy and non-motivation where your progress stumbles in front of some unexpected barrier and gets blockaded by external forces. Sometimes these external forces are nothing else than our inner critic speaking to us as the amalgamation of all the early values and standards that got enforced to us throughout childhood by our close environment. The patterns, values and inner judgements of what is acceptable and what not, got ingrained and transformed eventually to the pattern and mode we treat ourselves today in the form of our inner voice. Other times these judgements may come from other people which contradict our expectations and worldview directly as two opposing forces meeting and battling each other out. Whatever contradicts, restricts or influences our natural flow of behaving from the way our instinct dictates, transforms us to self-conscious timid entities limiting its ways out of fear. Any monitoring coming out of the brain that results in filtering our responses is an indication of a brainy disturbance of your full potential, shows a lack of belief in your true abilities and belittles your authentic expression.

The Art of Wu Wei

The above describes the situation of you becoming too self-conscious, coming from a place of vulnerability and unwelcomed exposure. There is an Asian concept about the opposite state of this called Wu Wei described hereor as we find it more commonly as Unstifling. Wu Wei is a heightened state of operating from a place of pure intent, lack of fear, high energy, and full acceptance of your surroundings. It entails the feeling of everything happening through you instead of the constant rumination on the right course of action and the repositioning of you as a third viewer witnessing actions and events with no much saying in it. It’s not few of those that have tried to control this state with different techniques and we shall investigate a few ways on how to achieve it later on.

Wu Wei vs Being in the Zone

It would be a huge mistake to associate Wu Wei with the feeling of being in the zone. They are radically different. Being in the zone is a closed state of you dealing with tasks using your full memory and processing capacity. Wu Wei is a third eye view state, where you keep your senses fully open to the world and you see everything as an observer including your own actions with an awareness and clarity that is unprecedented. It’s like you distantiate yourself compulsively from whatever is happening in front of your eyes in a way it’s hard to gasp and understand. Yourself is operating autonomously unaffected by anything else and you found your supreme beast mode manifested as complete unreactiveness.

So what is really this state. What is it’s core characteristic that makes it possible and how can you harness it in your advantage. Wu Wei comes from the earth shattering understanding that you can ignore the social conditioning and generate good emotions from inside out instead of the other way around. It is like reverting the order of you needing something from others like approval and good feedback to feel good about yourself and instead focusing on the fact that you have that issue handled on your own. Somehow you managed to appreciate your doings and havings in such a gratituduful way that it dis-attaches you from the need of external validation. This is the state you are looking for that completely frees you to open up to the world without regret and second considerations. It’s the state that allows your full charisma to shine through, your jokes to be a bit more successful and your thoughts and actions to be hitting the point a bit more accurately. For most of the people this state only happens once at a very while and it’s a rare occurrence that for the most resembles the haze of alcohol. Only in reality it’s nothing like that.

Unstifling happens every time you prove to yourself you can go full ignore mode of your social fears and still be doing good. It’s a bit of a bummer that it takes the social aspect of it to be tampered around but this is actually its core component. Most of it comes from our core social fears we experience that originate from our past and guide us out of trouble in the hunter gatherer environment. It’s basically the fear that managed to hold us alive through the centuries that we now kinda have the luxury to ignore in certain occasions.

What is really going on is that there is a loop inside your mind pinging of your environment constantly for acceptance and approval. This is only a natural behaviour developed to keep you safe. The problem is that this mindset creates a viewpoint of you being in the center of attention feeling you are constantly scrutinised for your perceived value and status. It’s only logical that you are gonna feel a bit awkward getting the defensive position of guarding against any possibility for mistake that could cost you the much valuable group acceptance. The point here is not to ignore all social rules just to make a point you don’t need other’s opinions because this is reactive as well. What’s important is to make the point that there is trust to your capacities and there is the belief that yourself is gonna find all the resources it needs to manage anything that comes its way. Basically saying no to the good help of the brain trying to prevent any mistake. What you‘re gonna find is that this freedom leads to you unfolding a much more charismatic and creative aspect rather than anything else. Partly this is how meditation can help someone through the stopping of thoughts and the full immersion in presence. You train your self to act instinctually, driven from the perceptions of the environment and the present moment without the forceful internation of the brain. It’s not few those that realised that a brain left unguided and used in a bad way, is a actually a barrier instead of a boost.

The Fogginess In Front Of You

The first thing you’ll notice from stopping this pinging mechanism is the amount of noise that occupies your brain and stopping you from seeing clearly and fully what is going on around you. It’s like a fog sitting in front of your face, altering the way you view the world. To unfold creativity you need to clear this fog and open up to what is taking place in front of you.

The problem is that meditation alone is not enough to unstifle you because there is the element of your standing in the doer-observer range. You need to guide yourself to switch modes from the safe zone of observing to the pure expression that is hidden beneath it.

So below are 7 practical examples of what you can do to make that switch.

1. Don’t stand on your mistakes. Actively stop the inner critic from judging your every move and allow failures to happen and pass unengaged.
2. Switch the internal question of what you should do to make a good impression to what you can do to have a good time and cover your natural tendencies of what you truly find interesting and fun.
3. Realise all the goods that come out of your life and the value you bring into others and how this constitutes a journey that is enough to generate good emotions on its own. This kind of appreciation is necessary to disentangle from the need for external fulfilment as you basically manage to fill the cup on your own. Once you manage that you are gonna be the source of good authentic emotions instead of looking for them in others.
4. Realise that you can be the point of assessment and witness more critically anything around you instead of being the point of criticism yourself. Ignoring the receiving part is counterintuitive but it’s only a mental decision at the end of the day.
5. Fight against the mental mindset that others approval and opinions can have any game-changer effect on you and your state of being. Even if there is such an ability materialistically speaking you need to transcend to a higher point and realise the cathartic pleasure that comes from an authentic expression. At the end of the day that’s the only constant that empowers you no matter what comes your way.
6. Give more voice to your instincts in comparison to your logic and brain. Your instinct got shaped through the millions of years of evolutionary knowledge and is much wiser than you think.
7. Trust in your capacities. You need to make the mental shift to actually trust yourself and believe it is gonna find all the resources it needs when the time comes. There is no reason to try to intervene in anything.